Carol;
“The Hezbollah fighter wakes up in the morning, drinks
his coffee, takes a rocket out of his closet, goes to his
neighbor’s yard, sticks a clock timer on it, goes back
home and then watches CNN to see where it lands.
LTC Ishai Efroni
Deputy Commander, Baram Brigade”
Battles are dynamic. Both sides want to win and there are no real rules. Humans have tried making rules for military conflicts and the enemy uses those rules to advance their cause, so the laws of war are honored more in the breach, so to speak.
Here is a MOST excellent article from the U.S. Army Combined Studies Center;
http://usacac.army.mil/CAC/csi/RandP/CSIpubs.asp#LongWar
Go to study 26 by Matt Matthews. He goes thru the Hizbollah/Israeli series of battles from the inception of Hisbollah to the 2006 round.
The point I’m dancing around is that war is the ultimate unknown and you never know what will happen. All one can do is follow the axioms and hope for the best. Remembering always that timing is a critical part of warfare. What is the right thing to do now could be a disaster in 15 minutes. Things change and the enemy devotes a lot of time and effort to changing things to their benefit. That is why having the initiative is so important. That gives you a chance to force the enemy to operate at the pace you want. It’s called ‘operating inside their cycle’ in reference to the Boyd Cycle or OODA loop.
No room here for getting into Boyd cycles or OODA loops. Everyone does it. You do it when you get the kids ready for school or persuade your SO into going someplace with you that they really would rather not go.
From the Military POV, the time to liberate Iran was as soon as our war stocks had been built back up and the forward air base in Iraq up and running. There was a window there that would have let us force a conventional war on the Mullahs.
It was botched at 1st Fallujah. The Mullahs knew they were vulnerable then, which is why they stopped their nuclear weapons program.
After 1st Fallujah, the Mullahs took the opportunity that was handed them to turn Iraq into a guerrilla campaign.
Right now we have the upper hand in Iraq or rather the Iraqi’s have the upper hand, since they are doing the heavy lifting while the US is doing the EBO ( Effects Based Operations, milspeak for blowing sh1t up).
Keep in mind that in the written history of warfare, going back 5,500 years, No guerrilla has ever lost when they had outside support. The G needs a place to rest up from operations, which are rougher on the G then on the occupation troops. Winning Hearts and Minds isn’t enough on it’s own, you have to remove the support from the guerrillas also.
The US has been trying to do that diplomatically, which is always the best way to go. The Mullahs gave Iraq the run around when they approached them a couple of weeks ago. So we will soon see if Diplomacy has run it’s course. When diplomacy fails, trial by battle is all that’s left.
I believed President Bush when he said that when he leaves office, there will be no Iranian nuclear weapons program running. I could be wrong, but we are running out of time and will know by the end of the year.
Isreal made the mistake of going into Lebanon in ’06. What they should have done is dropped a bomb on Damascus everytime Hizbollah fired a rocket into Israel. That would have been the indirect approach that so often leads to victory at a lower cost. Instead they walked into the trap Hizbollah had laid for them. Hizbollah was operating inside the IDF’s cycle.
Regime change in Iran means Hizbollah and Hamas Fatah and assorted other terrorist groups die a slow death as they are cut of from support while being tracked down and destroyed.
